2019 began with a BANG!
There was my first poetry reading of the year (second ever) on January 7th with new friend and poetry colleague, Tzynya Pinchback, but missing our mutual friend and colleague Lynne Spiglemire Viti, who had organized the reading. It was a great experience that held the promise of more good things to come.
Less than a week later, I attended the launch meeting of my new WordPress venture with Rafael Alvarez, braciolejournal.com, home to History of Poetry in Baltimore / 1945 to the present. The actual launch took some doing—the setup encountered some problems. But launch, we did.
And in the process, I forgot to mark the beginning of Year 5 of baltimoreblackwoman.com. So here it is:
Welcome to Year 5 of baltimoreblackwoman.com!
I will continue to write stories, essays, and poems about life as a Black woman from Baltimore. There may even be a new music video or two. But there may also be changes: some categories of the blog may disappear, and new ones may take their place.
One of those changes is that I will not be posting a formal Black History Month series this year. The pressure to produce such posts for one month only is too much for me to handle now. But that won’t stop me from featuring Black History stories throughout the year. I am also reaching out to other writers to feature as Guest Authors, and I am exploring other possibilities: attending writing workshops, publishing my poetry in other spaces, and broadening my reach as a writer.
Wait!… What Happened to January?
In mid-January, I fell victim to The Cold. Not just the weather, which has seesawed between arctic and balmy, but also the nasty virus that’s been fueled by the weather. Today is the first day in 3 weeks that I’ve remotely felt like myself. It has taken weeks in bed with a regimen of “eat, drink, medicate [antibiotics and Mucinex™], sleep,” to restore me to health; my body healed much faster than my brain did.
And while this was going on, my beloved dog Roxie also fell ill. I was devastated when it became necessary to have her euthanized at the end of January.
When I lost my first dog, Sparky, in 2009, I wrote a poem for him. My second dog, Max, was honored with a song and a poem in 2010. I am planning a proper, written tribute to Roxie, and this will be my next post.
Thanks to everyone for your support.
baltimoreblackwoman 